Red Hat OpenShift Embraces PHP and Zend

I'm a PHP guy (yeaah that's right) and I'm also a Red Hat (Linux) user, so when those two technologies get together - I'm plenty interested.

Red Hat is now partnering with commercial PHP vendor Zend on bringing PHP to the OpenShift PaaS. OpenShift was first announced back in June of 2011 and from the very beginning, Isaac Roth (the PaaS Master) told me that the plan was to be as open as possible.

Yup, Red Hat (hello JBoss!) isn't a PHP company, but they know who to turn too to make PHP support a reality. The new partnership brings the Zend Server (integrated PHP server system) to OpenShift. That means if you're a PHP dev that wants to run on OpenShift, it's now dead simple.

Sure, you could have done it on your before, but Zend Server is really a great technology (and hey commercial support !). And sure, Zend has the PHP cloud, if you're a PHP dev that wants to get into the cloud, you didn't have to wait for OpenShift. So no, this is not something entirely unique - but yes it does expand the range of choice available to both Red Hat OpenShift users as well as PHP users.

"With millions of PHP developers in the world today, it is exciting to be able to collaborate on an offering that combines the power of Zend’s leading tools for PHP developers and our enterprise-grade application server with the flexibility and strong ecosystem of integrated partner solutions that Red Hat is building with the OpenShift platform," Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend said in a statement.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.